This week, Al Zambone is deep in the teaching weeds, and we thought we’d bring newer listeners an episode they might have overlooked from our expanding archives.

While this is a show called Historically Thinking, it’s put together by people intensely interested (at times self-interestedly so) in the state of higher education. Higher ed is often confusing, perplexing, and anxiety-inducing. Often attempts to explain it are well-intentioned but not well-informed; or they’re not particularly well intentioned, and play upon fear–the fear of parents that their children might not have a good job in the future, that they will be financially adrift, that there is the right school or the right major that will guarantee future success.